Current philosophical usage does indeed restrict the term 'idexical' but not to token-reflexives. There are several issues here that need to be disentangled.
Let's think about the English word, not the letter, 'I.' This one-letter word is the first-person singular pronoun. It is the paradigm case of an indexical expression. The most obvious thing to say about 'I' is that its reference is context-sensitive. Tokened by BV, it refers to BV; tokened by AR it refers to AR. (An uttering is a tokening, but there are tokenings that are not utterings: there are inscribings and other encodings.) But
1. Proper names are also context-sensitive
2. Proper names are not indexicals
So
3. What makes 'I' an indexical cannot just be its context-sensitivity.
Ad (1). Since many rejoice under the name 'Phil Spector,' this expression type does not count as a genuine proper name; it is rather a use or tokening of it that does. Thus my use of 'Phil Spector' in the sentence 'Phil Spector is standing trial for murder' picks out exactly one man, the record producer famed for his 'Wall of Sound.'
Ad (2). If proper names are Millian tags whose meaning is exhausted by their reference, then a proper name is not an indexical for the reason that indexicals have a linguistic meaning, a Kaplanian character, while proper names do not. Thus 'I' has a meaning that every speaker of English understands, a linguistic meaning that can be captured in some such rule as 'I' refers to the speaker or writer. With respect to 'I' and other indexicals one can distinguish between character and content in Kaplan's jargon, but one cannot make this distinction with respect to Millian tags since their meaning is exhausted by their reference.
If, on the other hand, it is maintained that proper names express Fregean senses through which their reference is routed, then too proper names are not indexicals since there are no such senses in the case of idexicals. Indexicals are paradigms of direct reference. This is not to say that indexicals lack lingusitic meaning. Clealry, 'now' and 'here' differ in lingusitic meaning (Kaplanian character) in that 'now' picks out times whereas 'here' picks out places. The point is that indexicals refer directly.
When I say, 'I am happy,' I refer to myself but not via a special Fregean sense that my use of 'I' expresses. For if there were such a sense, what would it be? It would have to something like the property of being me, a haecceity property that I alone have and I alone could have. This property, however, appears ineffable, and suspect for this reason. Given that 'I' refers, it refers directly.
Now let's consider whether indexical expressions are token-reflexive expressions. For Hans Reichenbach, the word 'I' means the same as 'the person who utters this token'; 'now' means the same as 'the time at which this token was uttered,' etc.
In the case of 'I' it seems false that 'I' means the same as 'the person who utters this token.' Although it is true that I am the person who utters this token, if the synonymy holds, then
4. I exist
is synonymous with
5. The person who utters this token of 'I' exists.
But they cannot be synonymous since they have different truth conditions. There are possible worlds in which (4) is true, but (5) false. Surely my existence cannot depend on my uttering tokens of 'I.' (Cf. David Kaplan, Themes from Kaplan, pp. 519-520.)
To sum up. In response to Rhoda, I say first that indexicals should not be assimilated to token-reflexives, and second, that not every referring device is context-sensitive, let alone indexical.
But there is another issue that may be at the back of Rhoda's mind. It is arguable that linguistic reference is ultimately grounded in thinking reference, first-person reference. If so, it is always a subject who refers using linguistic devices; words and phrases do not refer on their own. One cannot do semantics from a third-person point of view, abstracting from the intentionality of mind. So it may be that all reference is ultimately indexed to an underlying transcendental ego.
1. Referring terms whose semantics are understand through being part of a text, or discourse or dialogue – i.e. where only the words are available
2. Referring terms whose semantics are not understand except with extra perceptual information available to speaker and hearer.
Let me explain. When you read a story, or a historical text, the reference is made clear solely by the way the terms occur in the text. For example, in LOTR, an entirely fictitious work where none of the characters really existed, where the places and even the world itself are made up, and where the time (relative to our own periodisation) is completely undetermined. Nonetheless the references are all clear, relative to the text. For example, we are clear when it is Gandalf being referred to, or the Shire, and we are clear what 'now' means. We are also clear about pronoun references. '"I shall return soon" said Gandalf' is clear because what Gandalf uttered is identified, via the 'said Gandalf' bit, and so the reference of 'I' is obviously Gandalf. Thus it is equivalent to 'Gandalf said that he would return soon'.
Similarly for time-indexicals. 'That night the Company was again summoned to the chamber of Celeborn. "Now is the time", he said …' Because we can follow each day in the story, and because any gaps in time are filled in by the narrative (three days later …), we understand the reference of 'now', and 'that night'.
Contrast this with the world outside stories where the reference of 'now', of 'I' and 'this' and 'there' and 'that' requires a specific perceptual context, in order to be understood. If Bill utters a sentence containing 'I', he does not follow it with 'said Bill' in order to identify who is speaking. If he says 'now', he does not precede that with 'three days later', or anything like that. If he says 'this thing here', he does not immediately qualify this by saying he is pointing to a cigar.
I hope the distinction is clear. Is it important? Yes, if you think about it. The intelligibility of the 'story-relative' indexical does not depend on any word-world relation. We understand all the references in The Hobbit, or the Bible, or any historical work, even though the events and characters depicted there are, or may possibly be, an invention. We can’t understand the second kind, without there being a world containing things, places, persons and times that the indexicals identify. That distinction is surely fundamental.
Nice set of reflections. I agree that there are 'story-relative' uses of indexicals. I understand 'Now is the time' within a story even though the temporal indexical refers to nothing outside the story. So in one sense, "The intelligibility of the 'story-relative' indexical does not depend on any word-world relation." But in another sense it does so depend. For story-relative indexicals in general would be unintelligible if there were no ordinary indexicals. Analogy: modalized statements would be unintelligible without unmodalized statements. 'It is possible that p' and 'It is necessary that p' cannot be understood unless one first understands 'p.'
Similarly, 'In the story, I am King Blog' can't be understood unless 'I am King Blog' can be understood. But the latter contains an ordinary indexical the Kaplanian content of which is a worldly individual.
There are tricky issue here that I am not clear about. Suppose there is no external world. I could still say 'This is a tree.' Would you call this a word-world relation? Or, for there to be a word-world relation, must the external world exist?
You say that in fiction indexicals are intelligible despite the lack of a word-world relation. But aren't they also intelligible outside of fiction despite the lack of a word-world relation? In other words, is the word-world relation a merely intentional relation or is it a relation the obtaining of which requires the existence of both relata?
Yes. Although this is an idiosyncratic view of mine. If we consider film, rather than narrative, where the words are accompanied by pictures, then clearly if a character utters 'this man is a liar, and this man is a thief', and we see him point to the same man each time he utters 'this man', we can deduce an expository syllogism whose conclusion is 'some man is a liar and a thief'. If by contrast the character points to different men, we must infer that there are two men, one of whom is a liar, the other of whom is a thief. Similarly, we could suppose we were in some sort of virtual reality simulation, where the indexicals would refer not to some external set of objects, but would merely have 'internal' or 'word-word' reference, like a story. We can think of perception, or rather sensation, as a set of pictures which are an adjunct to the words of the story rather like the pictures in a comic.
On indexicals of time, I think it's even more obvious that in the 'real world' we are in very much the same situation as a story. I have a rather vague idea of the passage of time, and don't really know what 'now' is unless I refer to the Outlook diary on my laptop. And in cyberspace, emails and postings like the one I am creating 'now', identify time by the little timestamp. So how different is it really from the 'three days later' of the fiction?
For example, you say in your blog 'I have just now come back from a run'. What does the 'just now' refer to? Well, look at the time stamp on your post. Think of all those stories where the narrator keeps a diary with the date, or where the story consists of letters with a date at the top.
Indexicals of person are a little more difficult. Is there a sense in which the term 'I', as I myself use it, really does relate to some real entity, not merely fictitious and an illusion?
I say yes. But to what does 'I' refer and how? I will be taking this up eventually.
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4. Some undesirables: The skimmers, those who cannot read but only read-in. The sophists who, abusing argument, argue for the sake of argument. The ideologues, those who are out for power, not truth. The uncivil. The illogical. The politically correct. Worst of all, perhaps, are those who exemplify the anti-Socratic property: those who think they know what they don't know. If Socrates was famous for his learned ignorance, these types are marked by their ignorant unlearnededness.